My Summer Job

This summer, I worked as a city-guide for English-speaking tourists visiting Moscow. I took down some notes after each tour, in case I needed help remembering this stuff later, and I've decided to share those notes with you. So...here we go!

D’Andrea Daniel David, USA

A very optimistic, happy-go-lucky guy who went out drinking the minute after he arrived to his hotel at 3 AM. I probably should have told him how risky that might be, but I didn’t. After all, he only had a couple more days in Moscow, and I had no intention of making it scary for him. So I ended up taking him for a long walk, telling him all about our capital, and then – escorting him to the Vorobjevy Gory metro station.

He works as a teacher in Shanghai, and has actually been living there for the past 8 years. He is married to a Dutch woman, and was leaving to Kopenhagen to meet her in three days. He travels a lot during summers due to his profession, but his wife doesn’t always get to go with him. He wasn’t exactly too happy about the Chinese, because he wanted to teach the children about recycling, and all the locals thought that compost heaps were dirty and disgusting.

He told me that when talking about cafes, restaurants and shops, it’s better to say “chains” and not “networks”, and I think I’ll remember that.

No tips from him, but, come on, he’s a teacher. And a really nice guy. So who cares?

John Robinson, Australia

My biggest tipper so far – 500 roubles. But that’s not the best thing about this guy. Despite his age, he was wonderfully energetic, and a great fan of Russian history and music. He loves Tchaikovsky, and also a composer I do not know, Ippolitov-Ivanov. So I had to help him (through e-mail) find the latter one’s grave, and he was determined enough to manage to do that. I got many thankful e-mails from him, and my self-esteem went through the roof, because he kept praising me so much.

He also needed help mailing his things to Australia and to Ireland, and despite having wasted some time on trying to do that through DHL, we realized pretty soon that it would be cheaper for him just to take it on board and pay the excess rate. All in all, we enjoyed each other’s company very much, and he left Moscow with nothing else to wish for.

Catherine and Joseph Russel Southam, UK

I was to interpret a guided tour around Kremlin for this elderly couple. But I forgot the tickets at home. That was. Horrible. I’ve never been this mortified. I didn’t think we’d be able to get in, so I called Olga, and asked her to help, but I ended up having to talk to the administrator in the ticket office and buying the tickets myself anyway.

The tour itself went fine, though. The old lady and her husband warmed up to me after a while, and we had a nice chat afterwards. No tips – but I understand that, considering that they had a .0001% of the stress I had. It must have been tiring for them. Catherine is Scottish, and very strict, and Joseph is British, but he lives in the Middle East, so they have to commute. They’ve recently sold a house in Cyprus to a Russian couple, so we also had a talk about that.

Jayne Amanda Adams and John Philipp Revill, UK

Two wonderful people (husband and wife who have a daughter, Rachel, from what I’ve gathered) whom I’ve spent three days with. I met them at the Leningradsky train station, took them to the hotel. The next day I showed them around Moscow, and that went all right, but on Saturday I was supposed to interpret a guided tour in Stalin’s bunker, but a pipe broke in there, and we ended up spending the whole day hanging out in some kind of a fair, and then walking through the Izmailovsky park; eating Osetian pies at Chistie Prudi and drinking Irish cider in a bar next to the Metropol hotel. The day was filled with talking and sharing opinions, emotions, everything.

John is a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, a really witty guy, with an opinion about everything that goes on in the world. Actually, I think my conversations with him might have been even more fulfilling if his wife either wasn’t there or was interested in things as much as he. But she was there, and she looked bored, so I had to go back to talking about down-to-earth things, but that was also pretty good, and I finally slid into the British accent. Just as well, considering how much they want us to have it in my university. If they actually care.

Anyway, no tips here either, but they took me out to lunch, and, it seems, it’s not all that customary for the Brits to tip anyone. And, again, the experience was so much worth it.

Ambroise Boulain and Marion Lambert, France

A French couple, both very young, only five years older than me. There’s not much to tell, nothing out of the ordinary happened during the tour, but they were the first ones to tell me that my accent was British. I didn’t take that too seriously, since they were French, but it’s been a while after anyone’s told me that, so I still paid attention to their words.

Our tour ended in the Gorky Park, which they were pretty excited about, since it had free Wi-fi. We’ve been comparing Moscow and Paris a lot, and they turned out to be very much alike, which is actually pretty funny, considering the difference in languages and the ways of life.

No tips. Pretty understandable – young couple, besides, I didn’t do anything all that special for them, so why would they give me any? The guy was unbelievably handsome, the girl was a little less impressive, but she spoke English better than he did.

There were more people, but you probably won't read till the end, anyway. Hope some of it was enlightening, though.